‘Ultimate Form Of Civilization Jihad’ Planned For This Michigan City

Former Lutheran church and pastor’s residence slated for conversion to mosque, causing a stir among Chaldean Christians in Sterling Heights, Michigan.

With wounds still fresh from a divisive plan to build a massive mosque in a residential area of Sterling Heights, Michigan, a group of Pakistanis are moving forward with plans for another project, and this one involves the conversion of a church into a house of Islamic worship.

The group held an “open house” last weekend at the former St. Mark Lutheran Church on 16 ½ Mile Road in Sterling Heights. But a group of Christians who attended said it was unlike any open house they’d experienced.

A Realtor was present, along with several Pakistani men dressed in traditional Islamic robes.

“They used the term ‘open house’ because they probably didn’t know what else to call it,” said a local woman who dropped in on the event Sunday. “But in retrospect I think they were looking for money. That was their plan, to show the property, explain what they were going to do with it and see if people would donate.”

The woman, who asked not to be identified, said she lives just two miles from the Islamic Association of Greater Detroit in nearby Rochester Hills. Mosques in Oakland and Macomb counties tend to start out small and become very large, she said.

Sterling Heights is unique in that it is home to not only a growing Muslim community but one of the largest concentrations of Chaldean Catholic Christians in the U.S. These Christians fled persecution in Iraq. Word of the open house spread quickly among Chaldeans and other Christians when a flyer showing the targeted church started circulating in the area last week.

There is a feeling in the community that the plan to turn the church into a mosque may be connected in some way to the Islamic Association of Greater Detroit, about 15 miles away in Rochester Hills. That mosque’s congregants are also mostly Pakistanis who speak Urdu.

Sterling Heights already has two mosques in operation and a third that is tied up in litigation. The city went through a highly contentious, divisive debate in 2015-16 in which a 20,000-square-foot mega-mosque called the American Islamic Community Center, or AICC, was denied a permit by a 9-0 vote of the planning commission. That denial received a standing ovation from an overflow crowd of residents at city hall in fall of 2015, but the decision would later be overturned under pressure from the U.S. Justice Department. The DOJ joined local Muslims in a federal lawsuit alleging religious discrimination.

The city settled with the Muslims and agreed to allow the construction to start on AICC mosque but then a citizens’ group filed its own lawsuit against the city alleging that it approved the project out of a bias toward Muslims, many of whom would be attending the mosque from outside the city, when the overwhelming majority of city residents opposed the project citing traffic, congestion and parking issues. Making things more contentious is the fact that the targeted neighborhood is populated largely by Chaldeans Christians, many of whom had escaped Muslim persecution in Iraq.

LeoHohmann.com contacted several Christian refugees in Sterling Heights this week to ask about the church-mosque conversion project. They all refused to speak on the record, fearing retribution from the Muslims.

In an interview with WDIV-TV last year, Sterling Heights Mayor Michael Taylor laid down the gauntlet, letting it be known unequivocally that, in terms of the AICC lawsuit, he stands on the side of the Muslims. Taylor said the city plans to “defend against it pretty vigorously” and “go after them for sanctions for this very frivolous lawsuit.”

Dick Manasseri, spokesman for Secure Michigan, a citizens’ watchdog organization, said that for any group to try to open another mosque in Sterling Heights before the controversy over the previous one is settled represents “a very bold move” that has raised a lot of eyebrows.

“Why would any church board, knowing about the controversy of the previous mosque plan yet to be decided in the courts, decide to open the door to another mosque that’s coming in from the side, unless they are a player in the interfaith movement, which is going on all over Michigan right now,” he said.

The targeted church property sits on 4.8 acres with enough parking for 150 cars. The property last changed hands, according to courthouse records, in August 2012 when it was acquired by an entity called God’s Love Overpowers Ministries from Crown of Life Lutheran Church for $375,000. According to the listing agent, the property is now under contract to be sold to the Muslim group for approximately $440,000 and the transaction is scheduled to close in less than three months. Since there is already a house of worship on the property, no rezoning hearings will be required.

The Muslim community in Sterling Heights is still small, estimated at less than 1,000 people out of a total population of 130,000. But more Muslims are moving into the city each year, coming up from the area to the south, which includes Dearborn, Hamtramck, Madison Heights and Warren, and from Clinton Township to the east.

Some residents have also noticed a change in the city’s Ethnic Community Committee over the last couple of years. The committee’s biggest event is its annual Cultural Exchange, and that event gets a little bit more Islamic every year, says Tom Mitchell, a retiree who has lived in Sterling Heights since 1965. The city’s transformation into a multicultural hub sped up under the direction of Mohammed Alomari, an immigration attorney who was named last year as chair of the Ethnic Committee. Three of the nine committee members have Muslim names, according to the city website.

“I understand the original founders of the Ethnic Committee back in 1990 wanted to help new immigrants assimilate into our American culture and become more informed of their new surroundings and new neighbors,” Mitchell said. “Back then the outreach efforts were for Sterling Heights residents only.”

But that’s no longer the case under Alomari’s leadership, Mitchell said. With Alomari’s approval, the Cultural Exchange welcomes not just ethnic-food vendors and musicians but Islamic propaganda outfits such as the Omar Center for Awareness and Understanding, which is a network of grassroots Islamist activists who work through interfaith channels handing out free copies of the Quran, copies of Islamic sermons and various other religious literature under the guise of promoting “freedom,” equality and justice for all, according to its website, OmarCenter.org.

The group takes its name from the 7th-century caliph Omar, an Islamic leader who followed Muhammad and is often referred to by Muslims as “the Great Conqueror.” He earned this nickname for his achievements of defeating the two major powers of his time, the Persians and the Christian-led Roman Empire. Omar is also notorious for instructing his lieutenants to never allow a Christian or Jew to have a position of influence over a Muslim, whether in the military or civilian life. So much for equality.

Another group approved to set up a booth at the Cultural Exchange in March was the IONA Mosque of neighboring Warren. They handed out free Qurans and pamphlets published by Sound Vision, a Chicago-based nonprofit that some say presents a whitewashed view of Islam as a religion of peace.

“Mr. Alomari, as chairman of the Ethnic Committee, approves whatever exhibits or displays get set up at the Cultural Exchange, and now I know why we have all these groups like the Omar Center and IONA Mosque being given access in our citizens, with free Qurans, pamphlets and flyers showing how to contact civil-rights attorneys and immigration attorneys, all written in Arabic,” Mitchell said. “This has nothing to do, anymore, with getting to know your neighbor, this is all propaganda for their movement and the average person in our community has no clue this is going on.”

Manasseri says Michiganders can expect more of this type of deceptive outreach, not just in Sterling Heights but in every corner of the state if Dr. Abdul El-Sayed wins this year’s gubernatorial election. He is running in the Aug. 7 Democrat primary and seeks to become America’s first Muslim governor. While currently lagging in the polls behind front-runner Gretchen Whitmer, Dr. El-Sayed says his people are going door to door and will “shock” the political world on Aug. 7. He promises to make Michigan a sanctuary state, abolish ICE, offer universal healthcare and free college educations to all those whose parents earn less than $150,000.

Something more going on?

There is something more going on in Sterling Heights than just the sharing of cultural delights, exotic food and music, says Dr. Mark Christian, a former Muslim imam born in Cairo, Egypt, who immigrated to the U.S. and converted to Christianity. It’s called dawah in Arabic and it’s the Islamic form of proselytizing and inviting the non-Muslim to faith in Allah and Islam.

Church conversions are an important aspect of this process.

This church property is reportedly under contract to be sold to an Islamic group in Sterling Heights, Michigan.

‘This is a very big deal’

Dating back to 1453 and its conquest of the Hagia Sophia cathedral in Constantinople, Islam considers the takeover and conversion of a church to be of special significance.

“It is considered the ultimate victory,” said Dr. Christian, founder of the Nebraska-based Global Faith Institute. “Muhammad said whoever does that is going to go to heaven — it is a very big deal to transfer a church to a mosque. You are taking over a church and replacing blasphemy with the real god, so it’s an ultimate act of civilization jihad [also called cultural jihad], and whoever does this is going to be rewarded. It’s also the ultimate act of dawah.” [See Quran 22:2]

There is a hadith that gives instruction on how to convert a church to a mosque.

“You go in and cleanse it with water, you say ‘Allahu Akbar!’ in the corners, you remove any and all signs and symbols of Christianity, then stand in the highest place in the building and make a call to prayer,” Dr. Christian said.

Dawah is always done in the context of raising Allah above everything else, Dr. Christian said. “He is the master of humanity and that includes government and religious institutions, civic institutions, everything. To make Allah supreme on the earth is their calling.”

Thus, the ultimate goal of dawah has always been, since the days of Muhammad and Omar, the crushing of Christianity.

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Leo Hohmann is a veteran journalist and author of the 2017 book “Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest through Immigration and Resettlement Jihad.” If you appreciate this type of original, fact-based and independent reporting, please consider a donation of any size to this website. We accept no advertising and are beholden to no one.

One thought on “‘Ultimate Form Of Civilization Jihad’ Planned For This Michigan City”

Islam is a threat to women, because Islamic teachings allow for the beating of women “from whom you fear disobedience,” as well as the downgrading of a woman’s testimony and inheritance rights. The Qur’an sanctions polygamy, child marriage, and even the sexual enslavement of captive non-Muslim women. These are not just teachings that “Islamophobes” have discovered in dusty corners of the Islamic holy book that no Muslim today takes seriously; women face all kinds of oppression throughout the Islamic world that the oppressors directly justify by reference to Islam.
Islam is a threat to gays, because it mandates a death penalty for homosexuals that is not, unlike the one in the Old Testament, essentially a dead letter today: states that enforce the fullness of Islamic law today, including Iran and Saudi Arabia, routinely put gays to death, and as the Islamic State’s short-lived caliphate in Iraq and Syria demonstrated anew, whenever Islamic hardliners determine to implement the fullness of Islamic law, this death penalty reappears.
Islam is a threat to Jews, because in all too many Islamic teachings and traditions, Jews are the villains of the piece. The Qur’an depicts the Jews as inveterately evil and bent on destroying the well-being of the Muslims. They are the strongest of all people in enmity toward the Muslims (5:82); being transformed into apes and pigs for breaking the Sabbath (2:63-65; 5:59-60; 7:166); and more. In line with this, Jews are threatened in Europe to an extent they have not been since the days of Hitler. And it’s getting worse by the day.
Islam is a threat to Christians, for it mandates that they must either convert to Islam, submit to Islamic hegemony, and be killed – the same triple choice offered to the Jews. The Christian communities of the Middle East, some of which dated back to the time of Christ, were decimated, as jihad groups targeted Christians wholesale as symbols of the hated U.S. and West.
Islam is a threat to secular liberals, because although noting the fact will get one dismissed as a “far-right” “Islamophobe,” Islam really does have doctrines mandating the conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims, and the major Muslim organizations in the United States really do behave as if they would like nothing better than the weakening and ultimate downfall of the U.S. government and free society, by opposing virtually all counterterror initiatives; polarizing American society by claiming falsely that Muslims are the victims of large-scale persecution and harassment in the U.S.; and stigmatizing all those who call attention to the jihad threat and the devastation wrought in Europe by mass Muslim migration as “racists” and “hatemongers.”
Islam is a threat to secular Muslims, because many have come to the West as a refuge from Sharia, and now the oppression they left behind in their home countries has followed them to their new homes. Islam in all its traditional and classic formulations mandates a death penalty for someone who is sane, adult and leaves Islam voluntarily. This discourages apostasy, obviously, but it also makes for untold numbers of silent apostates who live outwardly as Muslims while dissenting inwardly. Islamic hardliners target these people, when they find them, no less than they target open apostates.